Thursday, June 01, 2006

Why blog?

Lyla says that blogging is a bit of cop out; sitting in one's hut like a rishi and waiting for admirers to come in. Far from it. I blog because I am confused and ignorant. After Bush Jr. came to power, I started feeling that one cannot ignore the outside world and pure mathematics started feeling a bit dry.The few sites I tried had arguments, opinions, agendas and rarely discussions. At my age, it is not so easy to learn new things; a bit of science and economics are what I wanted to understand. But then I either only partially understand or keep forgetting. Jotting down partial understanding at intervals seemed a good strategy to keep track of what I am doing. As I go on, I feel that I should revise or delete some of the previous blogs. There are always personal responses from some friends and the very fact that others may look at these seems to put some intensity in to the effort and it seems to help in understanding things a bit better. There is a recent article by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide:
http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/brain-of-blogger.html
which suggests blogging can be useful.
Actually, now I have found a number of good science blogs and sites like 'gene expression' 'evolutionary-psychology' group site and that lessens the need to blog too often.
Trying to follow the resrvations controvesy, I looked for Indian blogs and sites. Many seem frenetic and could not find much statistics about progress of B/Cs and OBCs in most of the sites. Finally Sujai Karampuri suggested:
http://alternativeperspective.blogspot.com/
which has the explanations for the terminology used and some statistics. From what little I have seen, it seems to be an excellent blog, one of the best blogs that I have seen so far.
Some other blogs in which I have read a few posts and I found interesting:
http://www.theotherindia.org/
http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/
http://nomologic.blogspot.com/
http://vivekspace.wordpress.com/
If these blogs are any indication, the argumentative Indian is doing much better in blogs than discussion sites. Somehow discussion does not seem to be strong part of Indian culture and many discussion sites seem to gather groups who support each other's prejudices without much information gathering or discussion. Perhaps some of these blogs will act together and develop in to useful discussion groups.
P.S. (1/7/06) I just found out that bloggers are not exempt from bad writing awards:
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

2 comments:

Vivek Kumar said...

Honoured to have been linked!

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http://vivekspace.wordpress.com

Tabula Rasa said...

Likewise, thanks! :-D